More 555 Projects to Enjoy

We love all of the projects that are coming out for the 555 design contest, so we thought we would share a couple more that have caught our collective eye. Have a 555 project of your own? Be sure to share it with us, and keep an eye out for the contest submission dates. Read on for a few of our project picks.

A wonderful combination of a number of commonly used ICs, this amplifier with built in visualizations features the LM3915 as a circular VU meter, a TDA2003 audio amp chip, as well as a 555 to control an LED “breathing” light. Sure the role of the 555 is limited as of now, but there is plenty of time to beef up any designs before the contest is over.

A follow up to a previous project we covered, this revamped low cost fuel injection tester, this build by [Dino] has taken in to account some of the suggestions by Hackaday commentors to step up the submission. Be sure to check out the explanation video, as well as a video in action.

This odd looking perforated disk acts similarly to a record, however it uses optical sensors in place of a needle to sense notes of a “song”. Using 555 timers to generate the audio signals, this project definitely has a distinctive sound to it. Right now it is hand turned, and the resolution seems a bit low, but a quick servo or stepper add on and some more fine tuning could yield a very unique music box build.

Here’s a 555 circuit that I’d like to see: it watches for a trigger, then sends a pulse and starts a 2 minute (or w/e) timer that keeps being reset as long as another trigger comes in before the 2 minutes is up. Once the 2 minutes have gone by, it sends another pulse, and resets the whole thing. (It would use a motion detector to start recording video (i.e. press the ‘record’ button on a video camera) when movement is detected, then press it again when there has been no movement for 2 minutes.)

lol o, it’s so weird to me how a 556 is only like 5 or 10 cents more than a 555 and when you need a 555 you do get tempted but then you need to think up a reason for the extra timer, it’s sheer torture :)